Some of the world’s greatest surfers—including Kelly Slater, John John Florence, Sebastian Zietz and Dustin Barca—convened on the North Shore of Oahu last December to protest the operations of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) on the Hawaiian Islands, according to Surfing For Change.

Filmmaker Kyle Thiermann, host and creator of Surfing For Change, released the short documentary Pro Surfers vs. GMOs last week, which documented the longboard uprising and explored the surfers' objections.

While on Oahu, Thiermann interviewed casual beach-goers at the Pipeline Pro surf contest, met up with pro surfers and activists to get their perspective on GMOs, joined a march against Monsanto in Haleiwa with hundreds of protestors and ventured to Ma'o Organic Farms on the West Side of Oahu to document solutions for a more sustainable food system in Hawaii.

"There's such an unknown with the longterm effects of all the pesticides, and the herbicides and genetically modified seeds," said 11-time surfing world champion Slater. "Humans are kind of messing with science and just because you can doesn't mean you should."

The anti-GMO surfer initiative is part of a larger battle gaining momentum in the U.S. and other countries between critics who say GMO crops and the toxic pesticides used on them contribute to health and environmental dangers and proponents who argue genetically engineering crops are essential to increasing global food production.

"There's no research done that says they're good," said pro surfer and MMA fighter Barca. "When you look into most of the pockets of these scientists who are fighting for GMO, they're usually bought off by [GMO] companies and have a biased opinion."

Hawaiian islands are a popular experimentation and testing ground for biotech crops for many companies due to an ideal year-round climate, said Thiermann.

As the world's population grows and the planet warms, demand for water will rise but the quality and reliability of the supply is expected to deteriorate, the United Nations said Monday in this year's World Water Development Report.

"We need new solutions in managing water resources so as to meet emerging challenges to water security caused by population growth and climate change," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a statement. "If we do nothing, some five billion people will be living in areas with poor access to water by 2050."

Despite a court-ordered injunction barring anyone from coming within 5 meters (approximately 16.4 feet) of two of its BC construction sites, opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion sent a clear message Saturday that they would not back down.

Twenty-eight demonstrators were arrested March 17 after blocking the front gate to Kinder Morgan's tank farm in Burnaby, BC for four hours, according to a press release put out by Protect the Inlet, the group leading the protest.

Climate change is a big, ugly, unwieldy problem, and it's getting worse by the day. Emissions are rising. Ice is melting, and virtually no one is taking the carbon crisis as seriously as the issue demands. Countries need to radically overhaul their energy systems in just a few short decades, replacing coal, oil and gas with clean energy. Even if countries overcome the political obstacles necessary to meet that aim, they can expect heat waves, drought and storms unseen in the history of human civilization and enough flooding to submerge Miami Beach.

Trump has loudly declared his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, but, behind the tweets and the headlines, U.S. officials and scientists have carried on working with international partners to fight climate change, Reuters reported Wednesday.

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in the first place. Clean water is a basic human right that should never be treated as collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet, but that is exactly what is happening.